Slavery was Big Business...and It Still Is!

Perhaps the most commonly misunderstood issue of our time is slavery. On the other hand it could just as easily be nuclear war, hunger, global warming, why the Star Wars franchise is so popular, who would win a fight, Superman or the Mighty Thor. Or, how the hell Barack Obama ever won a second term as president. It isn't my intention to minimize the effect of slavery by making thoughtless jokes. I make thoughtless jokes for other reasons, namely because the way that we talk about historical slavery is, to put it mildly, thoughtless horsesh*t!

I realize as a white-man I stand in as a proxy for every Honky, O-fay, Cracker that was ever born. And my previous statement about President Obama only tends to reinforce the depth of my depravity as a privileged male of the Caucasian persuasion. After all, what could I possibly know about being Black?

For starters I’m Slavic on my father’s side of the family, and the Slavs were the original slaves, which is where the term slave comes from. My mother’s side of the family came from England, the country most responsible for ending slavery. And I was descended from British Statesman William Pitt, who was a prime mover in the abolition of global slavery. I was also nursed as baby by a descendant of slaves, an older African American woman named Leila; she was, like my own family, a poor sharecropper.

When my mother turned eighteen she moved from Yazoo City Mississippi, to Chicago, where she used to double date with Count Basie’s one of a kind guitarist Freddy Green and hung out with Joe Williams, Basie’s great vocalist (both were Black "HA"!) She eventually married my father, a dark skinned man of Slavic descent who was the product of the Indo/Eurasian people, that’s a combination of African/Asian and Caucasian. I am, both slave and master, throw some Asian and Indian in there and you have a man for all people, I should kick my own ass and pay myself some reparations. One more thing, if you don’t like it, “You can blow it out your ass”! With that said, let’s get down to the dirty business of slavery, and the many secrets withheld from polite conversation for fear of a revolution. If you disagree with me, remember, I’m Black, White and Asian, you can’t beat that, so don’t even try!

One of the most popular myths is that slavery was a white, European, Christian phenomenon. The reality is that slavery was essentially a universal institution. It existed before written history, with the oldest example dating back at least ten thousand years to the Near East and Egypt, and the last time I looked, Egypt was on the African continent. Where slavery has been abolished just about everywhere else in the world, there are still as many as twenty million people living as bond slaves, primarily in Southeast Asia and parts of Africa today.

The largest movement of slaves was the Muslim slave trade that existed in the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. involving as many as eighteen million African people. It was dark-skinned, North African and Middle Eastern people taking other dark-skinned Africans as slaves, not Europeans during this period. Europeans were certainly involved in slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, which involved as many as twelve million or more Africans, was primarily European. Europeans were the purchasers of slaves, but it was Africans selling other Africans, captured in tribal warfare, that enabled the slave trade to exist and prosper.

This says nothing about the massive slave trade among indigenous people, including tribal Africans, Indians and Asians, meaning that slavery was a reality for people from every continent and culture.

One of the reasons that Europeans were as effective at enslaving large numbers of indigenous people, in spite of having a relatively small military force, were the tribal divisions between people of the same race. The Aztecs were hated by other smaller tribes because they enslaved, colonized and slaughtered the dissenters.

Indigenous people, whether African, Indian or European didn’t view themselves as members of a race. The paradigm of race was a much later scientific development of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a product of the scientific revolution and the emerging sciences of anthropology and sociology.

Darwinism played a fundamental role in the way in which scientists viewed the issue of race, including Social Darwinism, the idea of the survival of the fittest taken from the animal kingdom and applied to human populations. But, even this wasn't motivated by racial bias, it was simply a natural extension of the best scientific thought of the time, better understood as a case of too much inference and too little evidence.

Another myth is that slavery was motivated by racial hatred. Most slave-trading was based on a demand for cheap labor, not racial bias. In a world where interaction between racially diverse people was made difficult by limited methods of ocean travel, the basis for slavery was primarily tribal. If racial hatred had been the prime motivator, the easy thing would've been to leave Africans in Africa. Not risk life, limb and substantial fortunes on long, treacherous ocean voyages in wooden ships, so that white people could properly act out their alleged racial hatred against blacks. In fact, the American colonies didn't get into the slave business until the legalization of slavery in the 1650’s. Even then, the first slaves came to the thirteen colonies purely by accident when The White Lion, a Dutch ship limped into Virginia’s harbor as the result of damage suffered en route to Mexico.

Of the 12,000,000 Africans enslaved during the European slave trade, only about 365,000 came to the U.S. The greatest death toll from the slave trade, about 6,000,000 people, occurred in Africa, by other Africans engaging in tribal warfare and capture by the victors. This can make it very hard to define who the bad guys were, since the bad guys may just as readily look like Jessie Jackson and President Obama as the average white guy.

In any civil lawsuit you need to have a clear plaintiff and defendant. In this case, skin color is the means of clarification. As long as the boundaries are well defined, reparations, whether paid directly in the form of actual payments, or indirectly, in the form of a variety of racially-motivated government programs, can be funneled to the appropriate recipients, those with the right connection and right complexion. The historical reality is far more nuanced, which obscures the money trail.

It was a white, Christian Englishman named William Wilberforce, acting on his deeply held religious convictions, under the influence of previously mentioned William Pitt, living on a tiny island of enlightened, democracy- and freedom-loving Christians that was the catalyst for the end of slavery. Not Africa, China or India, but, Christian England. And it was Christianity, not Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism or Islam that served as the primary moral catalyst. Yes, there were people who defined themselves as “Christian” behind all manner of atrocities, including slavery. Just like there are people who consider themselves Liberals, Conservatives, Capitalists, Communists and Socialists whose actions, both good and bad, may be wholly inconsistent with their alleged ideologies and affiliations. What does this mean? It means that the simplistic way in which people from every walk of life tend to understand “their” world, as a carefully organized and circumscribed mental process whose basic intent appears to be, “Give comfort to thyself above all else, and remain isolated from contamination, lest the strange thoughts of heretics quell the quietude of self-love.” that is the real enemy. Mark Magula